Television Chronicles: The Magician

Time has certainly been kind to The Magician (NBC, 1973-1974), the offbeat action drama starring Bill Bixby as a troubleshooting illusionist. Despite its intriguing premise, the series was a marginal success at best—if indeed a series whose network run lasted but 21 episodes can be construed a success.

But as we will see, the failure of The Magician can be attributed in part to a number of factors beyond its control. For example, the premise of the series required the writers and the producers to find plausible ways to involve Bixby’s character in matters that were normally under the domain of police officers or professional investigators. In addition, because magic was to be used in the context of the show, the writers had the added challenge of working the magic into the stories in an interesting, intelligent and ultimately entertaining way. The sheer nature of episodic television (a volume-oriented yet speed-driven industry) made that difficult enough. Factor in the Writers Guild strike of 1973, which wiped out nearly four months of prep time for the 1973-1974 season—as well as some fundamental differences among the show’s key participants as to what the series should be—and that made producing The Magician even more of a challenge. Viewed in that light, the series was an ambitious project that never really had a chance to succeed.

And yet, The Magician has lived on since its cancellation, finding new audiences in overseas syndication and on U.S. cable television, while sparking a renewed interest in the performance of magic. While some professional magicians remain critical of the series, others have credited it for ushering in the so-called “golden age” of magic from which the likes of David Copperfield, David Blaine, Criss Angel, Siegfried & Roy, Penn & Teller, and other illusionists have emerged over the past 30 years. In that respect, despite its limited number of episodes, The Magician continues to have the kind of far-reaching impact that few television shows ever achieve.

In The Magician, Bixby played Anthony Blake, a renowned illusionist/escape artist who had been imprisoned in a brutal South American jail on a false espionage charge. While in prison, Blake became close friends with an elderly cellmate; when Blake broke out of prison two years later, he took the old man with him. A few months later, the grateful old man on his deathbed bestowed upon the Magician a considerable fortune. Blake then became a sort of modern-day Count of Monte Cristo, putting his wealth and skills to the use of other victims of injustice. In contrast to most other TV crime stoppers, Blake didn't carry a gun—in fact, he abhorred violence, and instead relied on his skills as a magician as his only arsenal against evil. "[With his magic], he overcomes brutality with dexterity and intelligence, and shows that compassion and intellect are stronger than brawn and brute force," proclaimed a spokesman for the show in 1973.

The concept of The Magician originated with Bruce Lansbury (Mission: Impossible, Murder, She Wrote). The younger brother of Angela Lansbury, Bruce Lansbury was the executive in charge of the television department at Paramount Pictures, where The Magician was produced. Sometime in 1972, Lansbury approached writer/producer Joseph Stefano (Psycho, The Outer Limits) to develop the idea into a pilot.

"I had a meeting with some of the executives at Paramount, and I remember their saying that they wanted 'a magician who would also be a detective,'" Stefano recalls. "This was not on paper—this was what was said to me at the meeting. I'm quite sure there wasn't any book or outline. If there was, I don't remember seeing it, or perhaps reading it. Sometimes when people call me in and say they have an idea for a movie they want to do, which happens a lot in television (and I did a lot of TV-movies in the 70s)—they'll say, 'Well, we'd love to do something like this,' and if I liked the idea, I'd just go away and create it. And even if Paramount had any material on the 'magician' idea, I really wasn't interested in seeing it, because that, to me, would just amount to research—and it also might, on the other hand, amount to sharing a credit with somebody. So I always felt that I would start from scratch, so that I could be able to sit back afterward and honestly say, 'Yes, I created this from scratch'—whereas, if I'd read something, I wouldn't be able to say that.

"I didn't feel that mixing the magician and the detective was a good idea,” Stefano continues. “’Unless,' I said, 'one of those jobs would have to be an avocation.' So what does he do: is he a detective all day, and then go to clubs at night? I didn't see how I could have gotten those two things involved.

”But, I figured, if he's a magician, period—and you call it The Magician—and he then gets involved in situations which he solves, or where he helps somebody... In the pilot story, for example, he didn't even know the people that he would be dealing with. It wasn't as if anyone came into his room and said, 'I'm having trouble with my ex-husband,' or anything like that. The way I saw the show developing was that, each week, the situation would always come at him." [NOTE. As a rule, this is how the stories in the series played out.]

Stefano began drafting the story treatment for the pilot, developing the back story for the Magician, as well as his motivation for helping people. What Stefano had in a mind was a series similar in style and tone to Journey Into Fear (1942), a gritty, darkly-photographed film written by and starring Joseph Cotten as an American gun engineer who slowly finds himself embroiled in international intrigue. (Coincidentally, one of the minor characters in the film is a stage magician, Oo Lang Sang, played by accomplished character actor Hans Conried.)

"Journey Into Fear is a very dark, and kind of fabulous, movie," Stefano explains. "In my mind, I saw The Magician as being that kind of show every week, and so I went for oddness in the story that I developed."

When Stefano finished his story, however, he found that the studio had something much different in mind for The Magician. Paramount wanted something more along of the lines of escapist entertainment; indeed, a 1973 studio press release described the series as a "modern swashbuckling adventure, a show full of pure entertainment made for the enjoyment of its audience."

"Bruce had one word for that series," said Sutton Roley, who directed four of The Magician's 21 episodes. "If you ever wanted to make it a little more serious, or do something a little more dramatic with the show, he would always say, 'Remember, I want this series 'picaresque.' That's what he wanted it to be—and it certainly was that. The Magician had that kind of volatile, tongue-in-cheek feel to it." [NOTE: "Picaresque" is a literary term used to describe fiction in which the adventures of a rogue are narrated in humorous or satiric scenes. Just as the heroes in picaresque novels tend to get by life more through cunning than hard work, so the Magician would use his wits to "dazzle" his opponents into submission.]

The opening title sequence of The Magician, with its splashy colors, accompanied by Pat Williams' upbeat theme music, provides an excellent picture of what Lansbury and the studio had in mind. A pair of animated magician's hands performing basic feats of prestidigitation (such as changing three ordinary balls into three flying doves) is superimposed against live-action footage of Bixby. The hands also twist an ordinary handkerchief, which then takes the shape of a curvaceous woman, underscoring the element of romance that the studio also wanted in the show (the Magician, rogue that he was, would be something of a ladies' man). The catchy theme music, with its stirring trumpet solo at the outset, conveys the sense of wonder and spectacle often associated with the circus. (The animated hands, by the way, also became a regular feature of the first ten broadcast episodes of the series. Besides appearing in the opening titles of these shows, each act of this first decat of episodes opened and closed with a silhouette of the hands waving on and off the action.)

"The pilot was very bright and colorful, but in my mind it was nothing that represented what I would have done had I stayed with the show," Stefano continues. "After they read my story, the studio and I had a lot of disagreement over the direction the series was to going to go. Once I had an idea of what they wanted to do, I divorced myself from the project completely."

Ironically, although Paramount rejected Stefano's tone for the series, the studio ultimately decided to use the story he had written—Laurence Heath (Mission: Impossible) wrote the teleplay, based on Stefano's story—and even incorporated the back story of the Magician's brutal prison experience, which supposedly had no place within the format of a light-and-airy series!

It's possible, however, that the studio may have initially "rejected" the story because of a provision in Stefano's contract that would have paid him a fee for each episode produced, in the event the pilot went to series. But with Stefano out of the picture, Paramount could then assign the teleplay to another writer who did not have that particular stipulation written into his contract. In any event, Stefano was paid for the story alone when the studio elected to use it as the basis for the Magician pilot.

Although Bill Bixby was an accomplished amateur magician himself (he was a member of the Academy of Magical Arts, the international society of magicians), he would still seem to be an odd choice to play the lead. After all, The Magician was an action/adventure series, while Bixby's forte, to that point, was light comedy/drama (My Favorite Martian, The Courtship of Eddie's Father). But both NBC and Paramount wanted Bixby from the outset because they believed he would be an audience draw—and, fresh from the success of the critically-acclaimed Eddie's Father, Bixby was quite a popular fixture in television at the time.

A sixth-generation San Franciscan, Wilfred Bailey Bixby became interested in the theater while in high school, where he won numerous trophies for debating. As a student at San Francisco City College, and later at the University of California/Berkeley (where he studied law), he continued to perform in student productions. Four credits shy of his degree, Bixby quit school and joined the Army; while in the service, he decided to embark on a professional acting career, allowing himself five years to succeed (failing that, he vowed to return to his law studies).

After moving to Hollywood, Bixby worked a number of odd jobs at a hotel, where he was approached by a Detroit advertising executive and offered a commercial acting opportunity. He moved to Detroit for four months, appeared in a number of industrial films, and later made his stage debut in the Detroit Civic Theater's production of The Boyfriend. He studied drama upon his return to L.A., and was eventually discovered by an agent, who got him his first television acting assignment in an episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. After finding additional guest roles in such programs as The Andy Griffith Show and The Danny Thomas Show, he eventually won a regular role on The Joey Bishop Show. Bixby's next big break came in 1963, when he played a young newspaper reporter who befriends an anthropologist from Mars (played by Damn Yankees star Ray Walston) in My Favorite Martian (CBS, 1963-1966). After Martian ended, Bixby appeared in a couple of Elvis Presley movies (Clambake, Speedway), and continued to work on stage (The Paisley Convertible, Sunday in New York, Come Blow Your Horn) before embarking on a three-year run as the widower father of a precocious young boy (played by Brandon Cruz) in the TV adaptation of The Courtship of Eddie's Father (ABC, 1969-1972).

While doing The Magician may not have come easily to Bixby (as he would soon discover, there are some fundamental differences between preparing a half-hour sitcom and a one-hour action series), playing the Magician was another story. "The show is larger than life in many aspects, but Anthony Blake is a man who can feel a great deal of compassion for his fellow man," Bixby explained in 1973. "He is a man I would like if I met him—and that is of no small importance. Doing a television series is something like living with someone. You must like his character in order to assume his identity."

Co-starring with Bixby was distinguished Broadway actor Keene Curtis, a Tony Award-winner in 1971 for Best Supporting Actor in The Rothchilds, and a founding member of New York's famed repertory company, The Association of Producing Artists. An established star of the New York stage, Curtis had appeared in productions of such classics as The Cocktail Party, School for Scandal, The Misanthrope, Hamlet, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Twelfth Night, King Lear, War and Peace, and Man and Superman.

As originally conceived, Max Pomeroy (Curtis' character) was a highly respected if somewhat unconventional newspaper columnist whose endless research files provided the Magician with a wealth of information needed for his investigations. "I read through the pilot script, and I thought it was an incredible part," Curtis recalled in an interview with me in 1996. "He was a person who could speak six different languages, who always had a hawk perched on his shoulder, and who also kept a leopard in his den as a pet. He was decidedly flamboyant. He was an international raconteur, an international author as well as a renowned journalist, and he was someone who knew all the important people all over the world. It sounded like a very fun part to do."

Max made his home in an elegant three-story Victorian manor in San Francisco, where he lived with his paraplegic son Dennis (Todd Crespi), and Lulu (Joan Caulfield), a woman "who is all things to me [including the mother of his child] but a wife." Crespi also appeared in the first five episodes of the series. Rounding out the cast was Blaxploitation film actor Jim Watkins (Black Gunn) in the role of Jerry Anderson, the chief pilot of The Spirit, the Boeing 747 airplane where Blake also lived and worked. (Blake also drove a white 1974 Chevy Corvette T-top with the personalized license plate SPIRIT. Among the car’s features was a built-in telephone—a rare item at the time. “Not many people had phones in their cars before the ‘80s because the satellite time was so prohibitively expensive,” adds TV historian Billy Ingram. “I was just learning to drive when this show came on, so I naturally wanted a car just like the Magician's. In one episode, Tony comes back out to his car and some thugs have smashed it all up. I was more shocked by that than anything else I can remember seeing on television. They even ripped the phone out!”)

The 90-minute pilot aired on March 17, 1973. On the basis of good reviews in the trade papers, not to mention positive audience response in both test showings and the Nielsen television ratings, NBC scheduled The Magician as part of its Tuesday night lineup for the 1973-1974 season. That's about the time when many of the problems that would eventually sink the series really began to surface.

Everyone involved had high hopes for The Magician. “Paramount had been prepared to launch a substantial marketing campaign for the show,” reports Dustin Stinett in a profile of The Magician published in Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine in 2004. Central to the campaign was a nationwide tour featuring Bixby and the Spirit plane that, had it transpired, likely would have generated tremendous interest in The Magician in the weeks leading up to the show’s premiere. According to Stinett, despite the demands it would have placed on his schedule, Bixby had been looking to forwarding to the tour and was greatly disappointed when it was eventually scuttled on account of the Writers Guild strike.

Meanwhile, Laurence Heath and Barry Crane (whom Lansbury had named as the show's executive producer and producer, respectively) wanted to approach each episode of The Magician as "a 'mini-movie' for television, which would adapt the quality of movement and visual action usually reserved for the big screen," according to a 1973 press story. Apparently, Heath and Crane wanted The Magician to be similar, at least in terms of style and production, to Mission: Impossible, a series frequently noted for the "movie-like" quality of its episodes throughout its seven-year run on CBS (1966-1973). Not surprisingly, many of the key members of The Magician's staff and crew were, like Heath and Crane themselves, alumni of Mission: Impossible, including executive story consultant Steve Kandel, staff writer Walter Brough, director of photography Ronald Browne, set decorator Lucien Hafley, and assistant producer Dale Tarter. In addition, many of the writers (Harold Livingston, Richard Hesse) and directors (Sutton Roley, Reza Badiyi, Paul Krasny) recruited for the show also had ties to Mission.

Heath and Crane understood that both the studio and the network wanted The Magician to be an action/adventure series. But Bixby had his own ideas about the show, specifically with regard to how the magic would be presented each week. Among other things, he insisted that the illusions he performed on each show be filmed in one take, without trick photography, so that the audience would not think that it was being tricked or fooled. "Bill's ideas weren't bad; they were just a little different from what NBC had in mind," said Heath. "Bill wanted a show that had some sort of an imaginative quality that had more of an aesthetic appeal, than the action/adventure appeal. And that's all to his credit—except that it clashed very badly with the network, right from the start."

Technical consultant Mark Wilson, the world-renowned stage magician who himself was a veteran of such television series as The Magic Land of Allakazam and Magic Circus, concurs that Bixby, Crane and Heath were not always on the same page during the early stages of production. “They had written the story and then tried to work the magic into it,” he told Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine in 2004. “You have to do it the other way around. [But the producers] did not understand the concept of the show. They did not understand the importance of the magic Bill did on the show.”

Even under ordinary circumstances, the first year of producing a television series is often the most difficult. It usually takes a few shows for the producer, the writers, and the actors to figure out what works and what doesn't work about a series, or the kinds of stories that they want it to tell. Even in cases such as The Magician, where major differences existed between the producers and the lead as to what the series should be, there is usually time to work things out, either during the early months of script preparation (which, for series set to premiere in September, normally begins around March or April) or during the first few weeks of filming (which usually commences sometime in mid-June).

But the circumstances surrounding The Magician, as well as every other show scheduled to air in the fall of 1973, were far from ordinary because of a strike by the members of the Screen Writers Guild that halted production schedules throughout the entire television industry. Needless to say, without any scripts it became rather difficult to produce anything. The strike, which commenced in the spring, did not settle until late in the summer, effectively wiping out the early months of preparation that are often critical to working out the kinks in a new series.

"The differences between Bill and Barry and myself over the show might have been worked out during those early months of prep time, and we all might have been able to experiment with the concept of the show, with different kinds of scripts, until we were all on the same track," said Heath. "But that was totally impossible during all those months of the strike. The writers and I were forbidden to do anything, basically—of course, we did talk over the phone and things like that, but, basically, we were unable to do anything, with regard to resolving our differences in how to look at the series, until after the strike was settled. When we came back, we were simply trying to get the scripts written as quickly as we could so that we could get the sets built, and the things filmed, and all of that, because we were still scheduled to premiere in the fall."

Of course, some actors, even they if own a piece of the show they're starring in, don't want to bother with any of the creative aspects of a show; they leave those matters in the hands of the producers, the writers, and the directors. This isn't meant as a slight against Bixby—after all, his own production company (B & B Productions) made the show in conjunction with Paramount, so he probably felt entitled to have some say in the overall production of the series. Still, because the production schedule had been thrown out of whack due to the strike, it was particularly important for everyone involved in the series to maintain a spirit of cooperation in order to work themselves out of the hole and keep the series on schedule.

Bixby was a very meticulous performer—he worked very hard with Wilson on mastering the particular illusions for each episode before actually performing them on-camera. Because Bixby insisted on filming the magic in one take, without any camera cuts, these scenes often required several takes until that one, flawless shot needed for the episode was finally captured on film. This meant that the days on which these sequences were filmed were often very long—which meant the studio would have to pay the crew overtime, which in turn made the show even more expensive to produce. "The crew was working till 11 or 12 at night on those days, and the costs were horrendous [for that time], running up all that overtime," said Heath. "The studio was always on our necks about that, and that was creating its own pressures."

Although Bixby was occasionally difficult to deal with, Heath feels that his biggest problem as producer was not with the star, but the situation brought on by the strike. "The strike was certainly an insurmountable obstacle with The Magician, because we were not able to get the tone in sync, where everybody knew what the objective was, and was working toward the same end," he said. "Again, in the normal course of things, we would have found out about that right away. But we never had a chance, because we were never all able to get together during the time of the strike." As a result, Heath, Crane and Bixby were never quite on the same wave length, which made producing an already difficult series under extraordinary circumstances even tougher.

"Dramaturgically, The Magician was a difficult show to write because of this very problem: how do you get this altruistic magician involved in situations he has no business being in?" notes staff writer Walter Brough, who eventually penned four of the show's first ten scripts. "When I came on board, I met with Larry Heath and Steve Kandel, and I pitched a story with the following premise: 'The Magician has a girlfriend—and that girlfriend is going to be killed right in front of his eyes.’ That was the plot [for the third episode, 'Illusion in Terror'], and it knocked them off their chairs, because I knew they were sweating that problem out: you had to find a way of getting him involved. Well, I figured, if he had a girlfriend, and the girlfriend is killed right in front of his eyes, but he thinks something's wrong, and then he spends the rest of the episode trying to prove she isn't killed..." [NOTE. The girlfriend was played by Brenda Benet, who was also Bixby's wife at the time.]

Another highlight of "Illusion in Terror" is the spectacular closing sequence, set in Blake's workshop, where the Magician literally uses every trick at his disposal to thwart the two bad guys who are chasing him. That particular sequence was filmed at a Hollywood warehouse actually owned by Mark Wilson. "Mark was much more than the technical consultant for Bill Bixby," says Brough. "Mark was incredibly helpful to Larry and Steve and me. He sat with us frequently, and would tell us about magic tricks, and how the illusion is created, so that you could interpolate it into the story. For example, he helped me set up the sequence in 'Illusion in Terror' in which Bill had to pull off a Houdini-like escape from a burning barn. Mark was always available to us. Any time you needed to ask, 'Can I do this, can I do that, could he catch a speeding bullet?' and so on, he was there."

On that point, Wilson concurs. ”For the first couple of shows, the initial script would often just say, ‘Tony does a trick,’ and I would have to come up with something to fit into the scene,” Wilson told Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine in 2004. “When it comes to magic, television writers will run through their stock of what they know very quickly: pulling rabbits from hats, sawing women in half, escapes through trunks, and that’s about it. They don’t realize what a great reservoir of material we really have.” So instead of inserting the magic into an already written story, “I would supply [the writers] with the ideas that they could use for the magic, and they would write the story around them, which was terrific,” Wilson continues. “Of course, the conclusion of every episode was for Tony to get into some terrible trouble—some action sequence—and solve the problem with magic. Our kind of magic.”

Even with Wilson’s help, the writers were still faced with the problem of keeping the action moving in a show that was essentially non-violent. Since magic was Blake's only tool, the magic itself had to be dazzling or otherwise interesting to watch. But it often wasn't, as many critics of the show (TV reviewers and magicians alike) have pointed out. Although occasionally (as in the pilot, as well as the episodes "Lady in a Trap" and "Black Gold"), we would see Blake use firecrackers or smoke pellets to cause a diversion that enabled him to escape, as a rule, he tended to resort to card tricks or basic sleight-of-hand in order to distract his opponents. While Bixby had learned to become quite adept at these displays of prestidigitation, cinematically speaking, they were not exactly visually exciting.

Another part of the problem with the magic (if it indeed could be called a "problem") stems from the particular philosophy that Wilson and Bixby had with regard to magic. "I think there are basically two schools of magic," explains Anthony Maddox, a former professional magician currently based in Northern California. "One of the kind of 'pure,' 'show-biz entertainer' kind of thing, which is the 'Vegas style' of magic that you see whenever you watch David Copperfield or Siegfried & Roy. Magic is a sort of production number, where the illusions are part of a big set production number. These kind of magicians want you to 'suspend your disbelief' and pretend that you're really seeing magic. They don't ever want you to think, 'Oh, I'm being fooled.' They think that you should be enjoying the illusion.

"Mark Wilson, who is a really good magician, comes from that kind of school of thought—where the thinking is, if you expose a trick, or even show how anything is done, you are somehow hurting magic. In fact, the thinking goes, you should never under any circumstances, discuss a trick as a 'trick.' 'It's not a trick, it's an illusion,' and you should never talk about how it's done, or anything like that.

”This is in contrast to guys like Penn and Teller, and Harry Anderson, who come from a sort of 'carnival' school of thought,” continues Maddox. “Instead of doing this whole show-biz production kind of thing, they're kind of like hucksters, or cheats. They're the folks who say, 'It's a trick—everyone knows it's a trick, so why pretend it's not. People enjoy it anyway, so let's not insult their intelligence by pretending it's otherwise.' And so, if something is exposed, or if they expose minimal things along the way to create a better illusion overall, then they'll use that in their act, and they'll use it intelligently. Their shtick isn't necessarily 'Hey, come and see magicians exposed,' but if they can use that to set up something bigger, then it's another tool."

So while Wilson's presence as technical consultant was very helpful to the production staff, at the same time it put them in something of a bind because of Wilson's beliefs as to how magic should be used on the show. "I know that, as part of the deal that the studio made with Mark, it was agreed that we wouldn't 'give away ancient secrets of the trade,'" Brough continues. "I don't know whether that was a deal-breaker or not, but it was understood that we weren't going to go behind the scenes and show how tricks were put together, although sometimes we did show how Bill would set up an illusion. But it was an illusion, and that's the way we operated. You wanted to keep the illusion that he was a magician, not a magician who's telling you about his trade." However, Brough, who himself is an admirer of both "schools" of magic, also believes that the philosophy behind how magic should be portrayed was not the biggest problem The Magician faced. [NOTE. In the Genii article from 2004, Wilson notes that while the show held firm to the rule of not revealing how a trick was done, exceptions were made in the case of the director of each episode. From a practical standpoint, the director had to understand the workings of a particular trick or illusion in order to stage it properly on film.]

On the other hand, while the magic on the show may not have been spectacular, there were a few instances (such as in the pilot, as well as "The Curious Counterfeit" and "The Evil Spikes") in which Blake used the principle of how an illusion worked, if not the actual illusion itself, to resolve a situation. However, these stories didn't always work, either, because of another basic problem with the series: viewers found it difficult to connect themselves with Bixby's character (a problem that was reflected in the show's low Nielsen ratings throughout the first half of the season). Just as you rarely got a peek inside Blake's head as a magician, you also rarely got a sense of who he was as a person.

Anthony Maddox: "One of the problems that a lot of magicians have, which is talked about often in magic publications and in books on the trade, is that there are certain kinds of people who don't like to be fooled—they think that you're making them look stupid, or calling them stupid, or that magic is a contest of wits. The problem is, if you have a guy in a tuxedo, standing across from you, and he's just fooling you and fooling you and fooling you, how is it that you empathize or connect with that character? You probably don't a lot, because there's a wall between you—he's the guy who's fooling you, and there's nothing really tying you together. The thing that may interest you is the magic itself—you might be interested because something amazing, or funny, happens, but you're not really tied very strongly or emotionally to the person across from you at the table.

”That's what you've got going on with The Magician. He's not the kind of magician you're likely to feel any empathy for, so who cares?"

It is certainly difficult to find empathy with a character who is reluctant to reveal much about himself. Blake was a man of few words who usually left it to Max to explain his motivations. For example, early in the pilot, a bewildered Nora Duggan (Kim Hunter) suddenly becomes alarmed upon noticing the horrid scars on Blake's wrists (a remnant of his imprisonment). "You know, I really don't know a thing about you," she says. "I don't understand why I trust you."

"One mustn't study a magician too closely," replies Blake. "Never look up his sleeve, and never look under his hat. Just sit back, Mrs. Duggan, and let him do his act." Compounding the matter was Bixby's own low-keyed, mannered style of acting, which occasionally gave the viewer the impression that the Magician, who was supposed to be a man of compassion, was actually someone who preferred to remain emotionally detached from the situation.

On a more material level, it was also very difficult for viewers to relate to a man who lived and operated out of his own sumptuously furnished private airplane—particularly when you consider that The Magician aired at a time when the entire country was feeling the impact of the oil crisis. "I know that the staff had a conference about the fact that Bill Bixby was this one person on this huge plane, eating up all that gas, while nearly everyone else across the country was standing in line for hours just to get a gallon of gas for their cars," Keene Curtis recalled in 1996. "The producers thought that that was hurting the show, and so they decided to get rid of the airplane [when the series was revamped in midseason]."

Despite the wrench thrown into the publicity campaign by the Writers Guild strike, Paramount did its best to promote the show. Besides running full-page ads in major trade publications, the story arranged for a cover story in TV Guide, as well as a photo feature in the December 1973 edition of Playboy in which Bixby performed tricks with the help of bikini-clad models. The studio also commissioned magician Marshall Brodien to produce The Magician Magic Set, a licensed tie-in which hit the stores shortly after the show’s premiere on October 2, 1973.

NBC elected to open the series with "The Manhunters," the second episode filmed, featuring a fast-paced climax in which Blake clings to the top of an ambulance driven by the man who's trying to assassinate Max. "We shot that in the back of the Ambassador Hotel, here in L.A.," recalls director Sutton Roley, whose work in television is often recognized for the kind of visual excitement that Paramount wanted The Magician to have. "There were a lot of storage places and delivery areas that we could use to stage the scene where the ambulance drove in and out of the building. Actually, it wasn't much of a drivethrough—it was really more like a storage house, but we made it look like a much longer drivethrough than it actually was by repeating that footage several times. I also used a couple of large bags of feathers, and I had the driver drive right into them, so that the bags would burst open and there'd be feathers flying all over the place. I remember the camera operator thought that was pretty funny—and Bruce Lansbury, when he saw the dailies, loved that sequence, too. He loved all the feathers, because they made it look like the ambulance was going even faster."

Despite Roley’s efforts, however, the trade papers panned "The Manhunters,” noting that it featured very little by way of magic, spectacular or otherwise. This, as Wilson noted earlier, was symptomatic of many of the early shows.

Even more devastating than the early reviews was the fact that The Magician was getting pounded in the ratings. During its first three months on the air, the series faced stiff competition in its Tuesday 9:00 p.m. time slot—Hawaii Five-O (the third-highest-rated show in television heading into 1973-1974) and The ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week (No. 17). Meanwhile, Alan Armer replaced Barry Crane as producer five episodes into production. Armer was a solid, experienced, take-charge producer with an excellent sense of storytelling (he won an Emmy in 1966 for producing The Fugitive), as well as a track record in producing shows with offbeat or difficult concepts (The Invaders, The Name of the Game). Ironically, Crane returned to The Magician later in the year, but in another capacity: he directed episode 10, "Ovation for Murder." Crane remained one of TV’s most active directors until his death in 1985.

The Magician continued to be plagued with problems behind the scenes. When production of the series began, Keene Curtis was dismayed to learn that his character had been stripped of nearly all its color. While the pilot established Max Pomeroy as Blake's best friend and most-trusted cohort, by the time the series commenced filming, Max had become a two-dimensional character whose primary function was to "sell the concept" of the series. "Selling the concept" means reiterating a critical story point or element of the premise (such as why the Magician involves himself in the lives of people in trouble) throughout the first few episodes of a new series for the benefit of those viewers who might be tuning into the show for the first time. However, after about three or four episodes, it became less and less necessary to repeat that particular story point—which in turn made Max more and more of a dramatic non-entity.

"By the time we got the first script ['The Vanishing Lady,' parts of which were filmed on location in Las Vegas], all of the spectacular coloring of my character had gone out the window," Curtis recalled in 1996. "The director of that show felt that no one was going to believe the hawk on Max's shoulder, or that I could speak six different languages, and he felt that those things would get in the way of the show. So all of that went out, and when it did, the kind of phantasmagorial aspect of Max's character had been cut to a two-dimensional size.

"Still, since I had never done episodic television before, working on the show was a new and interesting experience, and I kind of enjoyed it at first. But, after a few shows, when there was less of a need for me to explain what the Magician was doing, I was given less to do, and it was no longer fun for me, and I became kind of disgruntled."

On the one hand, given the difficulties that Heath, Crane and the writing staff had in developing scripts to begin with (with regard to establishing the Magician's motivation for becoming involved, as well as working in the magic in a logical but interesting way), the series was hard enough to make, so perhaps it became necessary to alter Max's character in order to facilitate production. However, one can certainly understand Curtis' frustrations as well. After 12 episodes, Curtis sent a letter to the studio stating that he was not happy. “I said that this was not what I had come out from New York for,” he explained, “and so I asked to be released from the series." Given the problems the show was experiencing, both with its format and with the ratings, changes were likely to be made anyway, so the producers were willing to accommodate Curtis, making it an amicable parting.

All things considered, it is evident that NBC clearly wanted The Magician to succeed—otherwise, the network probably would have canceled it immediately. By the time the network moved The Magician to a new time slot (Mondays, 8:00 p.m.) in January 1974, so many changes had been made, it was if it were a brand new series. Bruce Lansbury took over the series from Heath (although Heath's name continued to be listed as executive producer for the remainder of the season, his actual participation with the show ended after 12 episodes) and brought in yet another producer (Paul Playdon, replacing Armer). The airplane, as mentioned before, was dropped; Blake now took up residence at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, where he performed on-camera along with other real-life magicians (including technical consultant Mark Wilson, who appeared regularly as himself throughout the second half of the season). The Magic Castle theater was actually recreated as a set; these scenes were filmed on a soundstage at Paramount, although exterior footage filmed for "The Curious Counterfeit" was also edited into subsequent episodes for use as an establishing shot. In addition, the opening title sequence was completely changed. The animated hands were dropped; instead, the titles and clips from earlier episodes were matted onto a deck of playing cards that Bill Bixby held up to the camera.

In addition, Joe Sirola replaced Keene Curtis, but as a different character (he played Dominick, the owner of the Magic Castle). However, like Max Pomeroy, Dominick was more a functionary than a full-fledged character: his main purpose was to introduce Blake and the other magicians who performed at the Castle (although, as a recurring gag, Dominick was constantly trying to guess how Blake performed one trick or another). The series also became somewhat become more action-oriented. According to Dustin Stinett, new producer Playdon approached Wilson about developing a non-traditional weapon for Blake—something only a magician might carry for protection, while staying true to the character’s aversion to violence. The solution was a set of steel cards (introduced in episode 17, “The Deadly Conglomerate”), which enabled Blake to slice through pipe, disable lights, and create other distractions that could extricate him from harm. Besides adding a level of excitement to the final five episodes of the season, the cards managed to level the playing field somewhat for the Magician when it came to hand-to-hand combat. After all, despite his athleticism, the slightly-built Blake was never going to get the best of the burly henchmen he usually had to face; in two episodes in particular ("The Stainless Steel Lady," "The Lost Dragon"), he absorbs a brutal beating before finally subduing his foe.

Bixby got along better with Playdon. The relocation to the Magic Castle, along with the frequent on-camera appearances of Wilson and other actual magicians (including Larry Anderson, Peter Pit, Ron Wilson, Dai Vernon, Andre Kole, and Mark Wilson’s son, Greg), was more in tune with Bixby's aesthetic vision for the series. In addition, no doubt to underscore the notion that Blake operated in a world of illusion, each of the episodes produced by Playdon carried the uniform title "The Illusion of..." (such as "The Illusion of the Curious Counterfeit," "The Illusion of the Stainless Steel Lady," “The Illusion of the Fatal Arrow,” and so forth).

Yet despite its new night, The Magician faced the same problem it had in its original Tuesday time period: competing against two Top 20 shows. Only instead of competing against Hawaii Five-O and The Movie of the Week, the series did battle with Gunsmoke and The Rookies. Nevertheless, according to Mark Wilson, The Magician performed well enough on Monday nights to merit serious consideration on the part of NBC to order a second season. Indeed, the outlook for renewal was so sunny, elaborate plans were again made for Bixby to promote the series during the summer of 1974.

“If the show was going to be renewed—as we thought it was—Bill was going to appear in Las Vegas as a magician,” Wilson told Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine in 2004. “We were working on that show when we found out we were cancelled.” According to Wilson, NBC dropped The Magician not because of ratings, but because of demographics. “Bixby said that NBC’s ‘mad programmer’ was not looking at ratings for those shows he considered borderline. The demographics were the deciding factor. I never did found exactly what demographic we had or were failing to capture.” [NOTE. The “mad programmer” is a reference to Marvin Antonowsky, NBC’s vice-president of programming in the mid-1970s. Antonowsky became forever known as such following an infamous appearance by Lee Grant on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in October 1975. Moments before joining Carson on the air, Grant was informed of NBC’s decision to cancel her series, Fay, after only three broadcasts. Once Grant took the stage, she proceeded to lambaste Antonowsky, denouncing him as “the mad programmer” while reportedly conveying her anger by way of a familiar obscene gesture.]

Anthony Blake disappeared from NBC in May 1974, although he did not vanish completely from television. ABC aired reruns of The Magician on ABC Late Night for six months in 1976, while the series also enjoyed a lengthy run on Britain’s ITV throughout the mid-1970s. According to Dustin Stinett, who profiled The Magician in 2004 for Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine, the popularity of the reruns in the U.K. led to the publication of The Magician Annual (Brown Watson, 1975), “a hardbound comic book featuring stories and simple magic tricks.” The Magician also enjoyed renewed interest throughout the ’90s, from a passing reference in a 1994 episode of The X Files, to frequent airings on The Sci-Fi Series Channel (and later, TV Land) between 1993 and 1998.

"I think what happened with The Magician is a story of people with high hopes, and with a high concept, who were working against tremendous odds," observes Laurence Heath, whose later credits include Murder, She Wrote. "I think the pilot film was good—I basically used the story by Joe Stefano, which was a very good story, and the film came out well. We got good reviews in Variety, and so forth, and that's why the show went on that fall. Of course, that was all before the strike. But after that, it was a mess."

"The Magician was a difficult series plagued by differences in philosophy, as well as by circumstances brought on the Writers Strike that would make the series even more difficult to work. "What happened with that show was a very unfortunate situation," adds Joseph Stefano. "I think that it was doomed from the start, really."

NBC did give the concept of a troubleshooting magician another try in 1986, but Blacke's Magic, with Hal Linden and Harry Morgan, went poof after six months. In the meantime, real-life magicians such as David Copperfield and Penn & Teller have fared much better on network and cable television. An abundance of magic extravangas have aired on prime time over the past 30 years (including a few specials hosted by Bixby himself in the mid-1970s). The success of these shows may lead to yet another attempt to incorporate magic in a dramatic form in a creative and interesting way.

Bill Bixby's next venture into dramatic series television yielded much better results: The Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1978-1982), which later spawned three TV-movie sequels. Bixby also enjoyed a successful parallel career as a director, with numerous series episodes and TV-movies among his credits, including Rich Man, Poor Man, Goodnight, Beantown (his final series, co-starring Mariette Hartley, which ran in 1984-1985), Blossom, and The Incredible Hulk. Bixby died of cancer in 1994.

"Bill was one of the most generous guys I ever knew," recalls Walter Brough. "I remember receiving a letter from Bill and Brenda after we made 'Illusion in Terror'—it was one of the few fan letters I've even gotten from an actor. They both loved that show, because, of course, they worked together on that show, and they were just so happy to be able to do that. His life was so sad, at the very end. It's a shame he died so soon, and so young, because he really did so many wonderful things in his career."

"Bill Bixby was one of the funniest people I've ever known," added Keene Curtis in 1996. "He was absolutely hilarious. He had a great, great sense of humor, and he was just fun to be around, because you were laughing the whole time. And he also taught me how to make the best martini I've ever had, I'll tell you that!"

Curtis returned to the stage after The Magician, starring in such productions as La Cage Aux Folles, Saint Joan, You Can't Take It with You, and Annie (in which he played Daddy Warbucks). But he also found steady work in television, including regular roles in One in a Million, Amanda's By the Sea and Empire, plus guest appearances on such popular network shows as Cheers, Coach, Caroline in the City, The Pretender, Beverly Hills 90210, Ally McBeal, Star Trek: Voyager and The Drew Carey Show. He also appeared in such motion pictures as I.Q., starring Walter Matthau and Tim Robbins; Sliver, starring Sharon Stone; and Legalese, starring James Garner. In later years, he endowed a scholarship at his alma mater, the University of Utah, to help graduates embark on their own acting careers; in addition, he donated his Tony Award, theater memorabilia, and many of his personal files to the university’s Marriott Library. Keene Curtis passed away on October 13, 2002.

For those who have never seen The Magician, the best way to sample it is to watch for the 90-minute pilot: though never released commercially on tape or DVD, it still airs occasionally on cable television. Other than what has been already discussed above, the pilot does not differ much from the series, except for one detail: the name of the Magician was originally Anthony Dorian. According to Dustin Stinett, who interviewed Mark Wilson in 2004 for Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine, Wilson actually urged Paramount to change the character’s name before the pilot went into production because of a potential problem: there was at the time an actual stage magician whose last name was Dorian. Though the studio originally scoffed at the notion, it obviously changed its mind after the real Dorian voiced a complaint shortly after the pilot aired. When the decision was made to change the name, one imagines Wilson was consulted to ensure there would be no problem with “Anthony Blake.”

As for the series itself, the best episode in our opinion is "The Man Who Lost Himself," a charming story in which the situation really does "come right at" Blake (Joe Flynn of McHale's Navy plays an ex-con who loses his memory after crashing into the Magician at a rehearsal for a charity bazaar). Marion Hargrove's script features some interesting dialogue, while Sutton Roley's offbeat direction adds to the fun. Other episodes of note include "The Queen's Gambit," the only episode featuring both Curtis and Sirola (although the segment was filmed while Curtis was still on board, it was not broadcast until after the series had been revamped; thus, a scene with Sirola was filmed and edited into the beginning of the show); "Lady in a Trap," featuring Robert Webber as Zelman, the man who had Blake imprisoned in South America (the show also features Kristina Holland, Bixby's co-star on The Courtship of Eddie's Father); and "The Evil Spikes," the final episode of the series (directed by Bixby), in which Blake uses footage illustrating his escape from a submerged safe to unmask the identity of the man responsible for the death of a fellow illusionist.

Familiar faces to look for include Mark Hamill, Anthony Zerbe, William Shatner, Yvonne Craig, Carl Betz, Joseph Campanella, Lloyd Nolan, Carol Lynley, Jessica Walter, Lew Ayres, France Nuyen, Macdonald Carey, and Eric Braedon, as well as nightclub singer Amanda McBroom, NFL quarterback Craig Morton, prizefighter Jerry Quarry, and Pamela Britton (Bixby's co-star on My Favorite Martian).